RIP: Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh has died. RIP.
Limbaugh had a huge effect on the right for many decades. I was not a listener, but I’m well aware that an enormous number of people were. I also know people who had their political change experience mostly as a result of hearing his show. His illness and death, although expected, is a blow to the right.
I wonder whether the MSM – who hated his guts – will now say some nice things about him.
ADDENDUM: Mark Steyn on Limbaugh.
Twitchy and some other websites have been publishing some of the vile comments being posted on Twitter after the announcement of his death. Far too many on the right wish to be perceived as civilized and principled without fully comprehending the extent to which much (not all) of the left (and not simply the hard left) is so mired in malice, rancor, and unreason as to be entirely beyond all rational argument and civil debate.
In addition to his achievements in changing radio and changing the conservative movement, it’s my understanding that he had a strong Christian faith. May the Lord receive him warmly.
There will be far more written about his human weaknesses than his spiritual strengths.
Spot on, Dwaz – spot on.
An incredibly talented radio entertainer. One of the greatest in history. Single-handedly created a new medium when no one thought it was possible. He was not only the person to understand and know the medium would succeed, he had the personal talent to be its best entertainer, as well as one of the best, if not the best, promoter of it. And, to not only survive, but thrive for as long as he did, in such a controversial realm is a testament to his cunning and understanding of human nature and the medium he created.
Sui generis.
I have to admit to being fairly devastated by this news, even though I knew it was coming.
Rush was a huge influence on me when I was a young(ish) mom homeschooling my kids in becoming-very-liberal Oregon. I was already conservative, but he helped me organize my thoughts better and think of things in new ways.
I didn’t always agree with him, but I will miss him very much.
It makes me sick to see some of the comments about him.
In his early days he was a hoot to listen to with his parody songs and imitation. Then there was the famous bake sale where a guy said his wife wouldn’t allow him to buy a subscription to his magazine. At first we was going to give him that but changed his mind saying that was too much like socialism and he hosted a bake sale.
I vividly remember one episode where people who supported Ross Perot called in and lambasted HW Bush. Rush was thoroughly flummoxed. But he was a good listener. That moment was when I became aware there was an incipient populist movement starting.
His high water mark in my opinion was during Bill Clinton’s second term. When Hillary Health Care Team was created, he was all over that like stink on manure. He really helped rally people to scuttle that toxic mess.
Also he kept the troops morale up during Obama’s first term. He stated up front that he hoped that Obama’s agenda would fail.
There is no graciousness among the humorless apparatchiks of the totalitarian left. We will see that in other blogs.
He was a giant on which all conservative radio and TV rests upon his shoulders. It will be interesting who fills his time slot. Hannity is too pro-GOP in my opinion. Dennis Prager is a bit too professorial.
He will be missed.
Rush was simply the best.
The Left’s hatred of him and their comments about his death and legacy is a keen insight into their character and souls. Many of the Dems are just bad and rotten people.
One thing I learned from Rush is not to be so negative about everything. Liberals are just so unhappy all the time.
I wasn’t a regular listener but 2 of the men in my family were. When something big was happening I would tune in for a briefing. My mom once called in and was on his show. The night she died (suddenly and unexpectedly) among those assembled in my living room, that was one of the immediate memories shared. My husband and brother-in-law happened to be listening that day. So glad President Trump had honored him before his death.
His sense of humor is what I will miss. Hannity and the others just do not have that. Most of them just play a continual harangue that gets tiresome after a while, Rush was different.
I was never a dittohead and only caught Rush very rarely, not being into radio. But the first time I heard his show, I didn’t know who he was. It was in a lab at the university where I was doing my senior thesis research that some unknown person just left a solitary radio going all day – I was the only person in the room oftentimes. I forget what the subjects were, but for a few weeks, every so often, I’d hear his show and feel that he had some reasonable points and questions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say for sure that he played much of a role in my political evolution, but he was definitely stimulating.
As for the MSM people’s opinion, I would frankly prefer that they not (try to) say anything nice about Rush at this point, because everyone would either know or suspect that they couldn’t possibly mean it.
Part of me (a small part) is mildly curious about what Chartock would have to say about this development, but only because he’s also lived in radio for such a long time. (For those not from eastern New York, Alan Chartock – sorry, I mean Doctor Alan Chartock – is a retired professor of media or public policy or something who’s run the local NPR affiliate for ages and ages. Once upon a time, I used to find him tolerable for brief stretches. He’s getting pretty old, too, come to think of it….)
My liberal brother in San Francisco hated Rush with a passion. In fact, he helped run a secret and anonymous campaign against his advertisers. He also worked against local talk radio hosts in SF. He is very proud of his boycotts and censorship campaign. Stupidly, I don’t think he made any money on it.
The Left just can’t stand the fact that everyone doesn’t agree with them. That’s why they want to cancel and destroy us conservatives. Considering that they have the media and the schools, they are winning.
At the funeral of my liberal aunt, he made a comment about how it was a bad thing that her son listened to Rush as that was a source of division between them.
Rush made it “okay” to be a conservative. Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn appear to be the next media leaders. But I’ve got to say, I’m very dispirited. Rush was such a happy warrior.
In 1995 I watched the PBS “Frontline” documentary on Rush Limbaugh. Even though I was still a strong progressive, I couldn’t buy the hatchet job they tried to cut him with.
As I saw Limbaugh then, sure I disagreed with him, but he wasn’t Hitler or Goebbels, as the left hoped to portray. He was another human being, with his strengths and weaknesses, but overall he seemed to be a decent fellow.
It was a moment of cognitive dissonance and open-mindedness which was part of how I changed after 9-11.
Had a bad feeling this was close. 9am to 9:30 fits right into when I’m in the car so I almost always listen to his opening remarks and the fill ins have been much more circumspect about Rush the last week.
My dad loved Rush and used to watch his tv show before bed every night back in the early 90s and got a lot of joy from it. It can’t be said enough how little wide spread coverage conservative issues received before Rush came along.
It’s a great loss because I don’t think any of the other major conservative media big wigs has near the range of skills Rush had. Maybe Carlson but I’m not sure he has the every man sort of side that Rush had. He never stopped talking about his dad and Cape Girardeau and what they meant to him.
Huge loss.
Alan Chartock – sorry, I mean Doctor Alan Chartock – is a retired professor of media or public policy or something who’s run the local NPR affiliate for ages and ages. Once upon a time, I used to find him tolerable for brief stretches. He’s getting pretty old, too, come to think of it….)
Is he still on the air? He was riding high ca. 1990. Often had Mario Cuomo on.
I prefer reading to listening, so I was never in the habit of tuning into his show. The first time I paid much attention was when I read a few articles about how vilified he was, and how little the scathing reports matched anything about his real personality. Goes to show you how spiteful lying can come back to bite you just when you think you’re devastating your enemy.
Thanks, Neo, for linking the Mark Steyn tribute to Rush—it brought tears.
Late in life I started listening to Rush, and became a steady follower with his three hours daily a must-hear event. I had already begun to nudge myself to the right, but his broadcasts were eye-opening, refreshingly humorous and deeply satisfying. He not only made sense of politics, but he was decent, kind, and yes, even humble in his brash, provocative way.
The comments from the left today say much about what the left has become.
My late father , who died last spring, mentioned listening to Rush and got me started listening about 15 years ago. The local AM station carried Rush and other conservatives . I never sat down just to listen to the show, but often have it on while driving or doing office work or at a job site, though I tend to channel surf back and forth to Christian and other genres of music, depending on the subject being discussed. I did not agree with Rush on everything and sometimes disagreed with his style, but I would say overall I agreed with 90% plus of his views. As others have pointed out, Rush tended be refreshingly upbeat .
Cornhead,
Your brother used a portion of a eulogy of your Aunt’s life, her entire life, to comment on a radio entertainer her son listened to that your brother disapproved of?
Unbelievable.
“I wonder whether the MSM-which hated his guts-will now say some nice things about him?”. Is the Pope Jewish?
Rush was, first and foremost, a magnificent radio broadcaster. He’s also among the most important voices ever on the Right and one of the things he deserves most praise and credit for is that after being fully embraced by the GOP establishment, he had the integrity and courage to break with it over Trump.
Look at all the folks out there who still follow or at least take seriously NeverTrump doofuses like Jonah Goldberg. Rush’s audience was about a million times bigger and he could have followed the same path as the NeverTrumpers and gotten himself a lot of fawning praise and attention from the “mainstream” media. Rush was certainly rich enough by the time Trump came around to become NeverTrumper #1, audience be damned.
But he didn’t because, despite spending three hours a day mostly monologuing, Rush Limbaugh was not a narcissist. It was never about him. He actually cared about his fans and his country and what was best for them. Not what was best for him.
Mike
I wasn’t a listener but I appreciated his impact. While there is nothing funny about his demise, I thought I’d mention this story from the recent past which brings a smile to my face. Perhaps some of you haven’t seen it previously, though I’m sure some have.
Susan Rice’s Son Is a Dittohead!
Jvermeer…exactly!
No, they won’t. Not a chance.
Rush was not exactly my cup of tea (talk radio in general is not really my cup of tea), but I do understand and appreciate what a profound impact he had on American political discourse. Brash, aggressive, sometimes hyperbolic and provocative, the man did more to make conservative ideas and policy positions mainstream more than any other American, except for Ronald Reagan.
Not much of a radio person, but I listened to him a few times on AFN Pacific when living in Tokyo in early 2000s. Back then was a far less critical imbiber of mainstream Received Opinion than I am now. First time I happened across his show, I tuned in in the middle of a segment. At the next break was very surprised to learn that the warm, funny, avuncular fellow I’d been listening to was the supposed Goebbels of the Airwaves I’d been seeing references to here and there in the MSM. A small data point in one’s gradual awakening.
Oh well… One minute you’re listening to Rush, the next you’re knocking down the pink flamingos in the front yard and putting up Arno Breker knockoffs… So it goes.
He fought the good fight. RIP.
New York Times was as classy as expected:
“Rush Limbaugh, Who Built Talk Radio Into Right-Wing Attack Machine, Dies
Mr. Limbaugh, 70, who helped transform the G.O.P., pushed talk radio to the right with misogynistic and racist language and conspiracy theories.”
Yup, that really sums up the deceased and his lifetime accomplishments so that the Times reader knows what’s what…
I rarely heard his show, but he truly mastered the medium, and his love for his audience and the country was evident.
Griffin: “It can’t be said enough how little wide spread coverage conservative issues received before Rush came along.”
Very true. There was Bill Buckley, but he never attracted the masses that listened to Rush. There was Ronaldus Maximus, as Rush called Reagan, who managed to bring conservatism to many more than Buckley, but he still didn’t reach the numbers that Rush did..
In 1993 I had just retired and we were building our home in eastern Washington. Many trips to Wenatchee, WA for supplies. I listened to the local AM show on those drives and they had Rush on. I was hooked. Here was a man who could delineate conservative principles and do it with humor, much as Reagan could. I had always been a conservative, but Rush showed me how to think more systematically about what I believed. And to be a happy, optimistic conservative.
What he has done for this country and the conservative movement is immense. I see no one on the horizon who can take his place. We have lost a giant. A very sad moment. RIP, Rush, our happy warrior.
Before I started listening to Rush in the mid 90s I was a liberal. I’m a reader rather than a listener but at that time my job required me to be on the road throughout the day. When I first started to listen to Rush, I could only listen so long and, in the beginning frequently changed stations in disgust.
It’s not an exageration to state that he mentally dragged me kicking and screaming over to conservatism. As much as I wanted to reject his POV, once I started to deeply consider what he was saying, I couldn’t dismiss it and gradually he opened my eyes.
That’s a debt I’ll never be able to directly pay back, so I’ve tried to pay his gift forward.
No surprise that the NY Times would call Rush a misogynist and racist. Neither was true, as anyone who listened for any length of time knows. They can’t beat conservatives on ideas, so they have to use ugly falsehoods.
Art Deco, I don’t know for sure, since I stopped listening to NPR quite a few years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if even now he were to at least make time once in a while to drive down to the studio for pledge drives and contribute some of his live pitter-patter.
Anyway, rather than turn this into a ‘Chahtock’ conversation, I wish I had more to say about Rush other than that, while I had little direct exposure to his work, clearly his popularization of conservative thinking gave rise to part of the sea in which I tend to swim these days. For that, I’m grateful.
Enjoyable to read all the comments.
Like several above, Rush was a rare visitor to my ears. A couple of times a year I would be driving to a dentist appt or similar during work hours and I would catch 10 or 20 minutes of the EIB Network.
He seemed pretty mild to me. I never figured out what made libs object so fiercely.
When I lived overseas, I downloaded Rush’s podcasts and listened, just to hear American voices. The only downside was that his music use license would not allow rebroadcast of all those wonderful musical parodies.
JimNorCal, I think they hated him so much because he laughed at them.
“I never figured out what made libs object so fiercely.”
He enjoyed life. Refused to bow to them, and he articulately and accurately explained all the errors in their arguments. Their only chance was to demonize him so much folks would never tune in. If they did, as with Geoffrey Britain, he would convert them to the truth, and common sense.
First heard of Rush in the early 1990s, when I was still in high school. Heard more about him while I was in the military, and of course in the late 90s during Clinton impeachment. Didn’t actually start listening on a regular basis until after 9/11, when I made sure to catch him anytime I could. He was my regular Highway companion for many years of business travel. I missed most of his last year on the air, sadly, due to changes in my life, but I heard his broadcast in late December when he spoke about having outlived his prognosis. He’d outlined so many of his prognoses, it was hard to believe that this one would actually get him. Thanks, Rush, for fighting the good fight with a smile on your face.
First heard Rush in Colorado Springs during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Awesome. He was saying everything that I was feeling about the hearings. Turned into a full time listener. Loved every minute of it. Some things he did spectacularly. Some things he did less well. But all in all, a Happy Warrior, with a kindness and depth of soul all but impossible to appreciate. Godspeed, Rush and prayers for all your survivors and all the rest of us now with a Rush-sized hole in our hearts. Cheers –
A good friend from high school, liberal, hippie-ish, later a lawyer, listened to Rush while driving, argued with Rush in his car, but eventually ran out of arguments and became conservative.
His father was conservative and a decorated vet from WWII and Korea, so I wasn’t entirely surprised, but Rush was the tipping point.
Geoffrey Britain, I love your story above! May I share it with my lefty son, the English professor (who incidentally grew up listening to quite a bit of Rush)?
Today’s Federalist Radio Hour podcast has Sean Davis and Mollie Hemmingway discussing Rush’s impact, his significance, and some personal anectdotes from their interactions with him. A good elegy and tribute.
I first heard Rush around the time of the 1992 election. Can’t remember how I came across him but it was probably a recommendation from a certain friend who was much more media-conscious than I. I was already on the right, so there was no change there. I didn’t have that much opportunity to listen to him, just when I happened to be in the car when he was on. What I remember most is the pleasure of hearing someone with a national audience openly making fun of various sacred cows who were much in need of being mocked. You just did not hear–or at least I did not–anyone with that kind of audience make fun of, say, the president of NOW.
He was frequently quite funny, and his braggadocio was usually half tongue-in-cheek. And he was often quite astute about politics. After a few years of occasional listening I pretty much gave him up, having tired of his style and being unwilling to put up with the very long commercial breaks which seem to be part of the right-wing talk radio thing. And anyway when I’m in the car I’d really rather listen to music. But I still appreciate what a breath of fresh air his irreverence was at the time. People who don’t remember the media environment of the time don’t realize that.
Rufus:
It wasn’t a eulogy. It was a lunch conversation.
I’ve posted on three of my blogs the following:
“Rush H. Limbaugh III has died of lung cancer at the age of 70. I used to listen to Limbaugh on KSTP-AM 1500 when I worked at a parking ramp in downtown Minneapolis along with publishing online and contributing to The Resister. The initial Wikipedia article mentioned his immortal soul going back to Hell, the pejorative has since been deleted.”
So many of you have siblings, children, parents, or spouses, who are ardently, actively committed, and emotional progressives; who, almost to a man, express a vehement antagonism toward the persons of conservatives ( and I suppose libertarians to the degree they register on the progressive radar) which is astonishing in its intensity.
Yet despite the mountains of raw material available here on Neo’s blog, we have never gotten an explanation ” from the inside” so to speak, as to how this develops, is sustained, or even works. In other words, the psychological, “Why?”.
That, is a big “Why?”, in itself. But placing the mystery of why it remains a mystery aside and returning to the original question: Why the emotion, why the hatred? It is in aid of what exactly, do they imagine? For the sake of what, do they claim?
We really have not even gotten decent biographical profiles which might provide insight into this widespread phenomenon.
I know many of you don’t care. But here is the thing: we don’t even really know what the f##k we are dealing with when we –
even those closest to the psychological phenomenon – cannot, or will not, undertake to explain it.
Is the psychology of others we lived intimately with really so impenetrable to explanation or to enlightening analysis right across the board?
I don’t get it. Many of you don’t get it either. And some of you were committed progressives yourselves. Apparently you were never the vehement “personalize it and destroy it” kind.
But the number of us who are bothered by this progressive emotional drive to destroy and tarnish remaining a mystery, and who are further puzzled to distraction by that hidden drive and vehemence staying unexplained, are obviously much fewer than the sum of those who notice and remark upon it in the first place.
Like I said, I don’t get that either.
I don’t find it so very puzzling. As I have said here several times, progressive politics is, functionally, a religion, and rejection of it, to say nothing of mockery, is a matter of blasphemy. Think of what you hold most sacred. Then imagine someone urinating on it, either literally or figuratively, as applicable. The way you react is the way they feel about someone like Rush Limbaugh.
The most extreme manifestation of this of course was Trump’s winning the 2016 election. Saint Obama’s presidency was supposed to be the beginning of the triumph of the good. Instead, a loathsome abomination stepped into the place he had just occupied. It was not to be endured.
When I was a pizza delivery driver I saw a large photograph of John Kerry pasted on an automobile as it were an Eastern Orthodox Christian icon. During the same job I saw a yard sign for Paul Wellstone attached to the wall of a union hall as it were an Eastern Orthodox Christian icon. We’re not facing a political faction, we’re facing a cult.
I guess y’all have all seen those prayer candles with various progressive saints pictured on them (Lennon, Darwin, Obama…).
The remarks by The Left are not surprising. See how the The Left reacts to prominent conservatives who pass away. Their compassion and respect towards those who do not share their beliefs/stances will be lacking if non-existent (i.e. RBG is able to get murals in numerous American cities after her death but not Scalia; Floyd is given the world but not Tony Timpa or Ashli Babbitt). As Mac noted, so-called progressive politics functions as a secular religion. They have their own versions of priests, saints and martyrs.
No, I don’t recall having done so. And although the by now familiar religion substitute theme adds a layer of explication to the phenomenon, it does not really explain the psychological or personality basis for this manner of acting out. It just provides a venue which suggests the operation of a particular mindset.
The mindset itself is not explained.
But then, maybe I don’t understand religion per se either, it never having held the slightest attraction for me.
Perhaps (rather than expressing what Haidt would characterize as the traditionalist’s moral tuning for purity or loyality) the thought is that the progressives are seeing in this politics, a system of personal and social salvation, and therefore react to nay sayers or mockers in much the same way as a lifeboat passenger would react to another who began chipping away at the hull in order to get wood shavings to light a fire.
If so, the question is how they came to believe or were disposed to believe such by personality and charcter, and to interpret and to react, in such a vehement and often knowingly vicious manner regardless of the level of offense.
And recall too, I am looking for the level of explanation and insight one would expect from the family members and intimate associates I have been referencing. “Religion” as a parallel, only explains so much …
DNW:
It’s been discussed here many times, actually.
A combination of human nature (the propensity to hate the other, the enemy) and the fact that the left and the press has successfully convinced a lot of people that the right is evil. So they believe they are fighting evil. They believe they are hating evil. Many are willing to make an exception for their loved ones who have fallen prey to such evil, but other than that it’s open season on evil.
If you believe that the right is a bunch of racist haters who want to enslave you, it’s easy to hate them – especially when all the good people, all the smart people, and just about all your friends and everyone you know – feels the same.
That’s just a very quick summary.
I agree that the issue of the astoundingly vehement and personalized malice which progressives feel and direct against non-progressives has been discussed many times before; and, that various insights and motivations and sociological explanations have been mooted and explored.
Here is the thing: even just taking the notion of “evil” these explanations don’t really explain much at all unless you assume a particular “brute fact” view of human nature. And then, you must either further assume that that nature is common to all humans, or that not all humans have the same nature … at least in some respects. Why must you assume one case or the other? Because not all humans behave like that provided the same social stimuli. The construction of the belief is not a straightforward result of everybody supposedly thinking so.
So, there are significant differences in operation here at some level relating to the nature (speaking loosely for the moment) of those persons who are reacting to, or acting in, the world. Now, just how deep these conditioning differences go is another matter.
We could if we like, say that there are at least three possible levels of explanation here: 1, a sociological/local environmental one of pure nuture; or 2, one based on A, a rock bottom universal human nature, or B, on rock bottom non-universal plural human natures reacting as “programmed”; or 3, on, some individual personality or character traits found unequally distributed – in clusters or otherwise – within members of a species having at rock bottom the same nature in all critically defining taxonomic respects but not so far as including the manifest behaviors under discussion.
Thus, when I go looking for an answer it is likely to be in the framework of assuming “3” to be the default case. And that is why I will say that illogic, or herd instinct, or circle dancing are neither explanations nor permissable moral excuses, and that there is some choice or character trait in that individual that explains part of the desire in the first place. In other words, I don’t accept that adults can be brainwashed or enticed without some level of conscious complicity or cooperation based on a perceived personal gain to be had, and a deep if repressed realization of the fundamental duplicity involved. Nor does it seem that people are simply meaty automatons.
And what we are talking about here (originally) are wildly divergent members of the same families: people who grew up experiencing much the same local environments, pressures, advantages, and influences, not to mention genetics.
So, Doctor so and so’s one daughter goes off X college, seeks employment in a bureaucracy, adopts one view of what constitutes justice and evil and which (conveniently) on her view gives her the moral license to conteptuously subvert, undermine, and destroy if possible the lives of others inhabiting the same political space. Whereas the second daughter goes to State U, graduates as a pharmacist, becomes a libertarian Christian, and eventually a candidate for the House of Reps in her home state. Her view of life is not only different, but so too is her notion of “evil”, and what it is that she may licitly do about it insofar as it she perceives it as latent in others.
Why?
@DNW:
Re your (3):
Are you familiar with Dutton & Woodley’s ideas about Spiteful Mutants? Social Epistasis Amplification Model and all that.
Why?
DNW:
I know we’ve been down this road before.
As I’ve mentioned, I come from a family where all the others became alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill or combos, resulting in four suicides, a murder, much chaos and great unhappiness.
I’ve thought about that a lot without coming to a certain answer. However, I guarantee you none of them pondered their lives and decided they wanted to become an addict or suicidally depressed.
I think people are much closer to animals than angels or even philosopher-kings. We live on the Planet of the Apes. To me the real question is how come some people are less ape-like.
I don’t have the answer. I know I fought very hard not to go down the tubes. Nobody would have been surprised if I had. I couldn’t tell you for sure what gave me the strength. Maybe I was lucky in genetics; maybe some chance experiences. Maybe it was all the Huxley I read…
Many conservatives seem to have stronger wills than most. So when they see Democrats going off the rails, they seem to think, “I would have to be evil to do that, therefore Democrats must be evil.”
I think the Path of Least Resistance is pretty hard to resist.
^^ May have a good point about Path of Least Resistance.
I put a lot of blame on the now trite but once revolutionary teaching that one should find one’s own way. How does that work out in practice when we only have one lifetime and many mistakes are irreversible and compound?
What is Tradition if not an evolved over generations collection of rules and heuristics which confer strategies conducive to surviving and (more importantly) thriving?
‘Find your Own Road’ is not at all good advice to the young. It is, however seductive, serpent in the garden advice and hard to resist once the idea is planted in one’s head.
Still, and in addition, would posit genetic component. Dutton & Woodley big on our very recent (1800s in West) escape from pure Darwinian conditions with improvements first in sanitation and then to some degree medicine —> less culling of the weak through infant mortality —> increasing mutational load in population —> more outright craziness (polygenics —> ~80% of genome expressed in brain as well as whatever it else it might do). Then get Social Epistasis Amplification Model which suggests that mutant nutters influence behaviour of less naturally mad people around them — see any university faculty lounge.
No, I am not familiar with it.
I’ll look it up. I had even forgotten what epistasis was, not being able to get some notion of it relating to classical or Biblical Greek out of my head.
It was only when I referred to an article discussing the evolving definitions of epistasis in genetics and saw that old reference to white, black and grey coat expressions in mice, that I had a brief classroom flash back.
I’ll need to review this carefully – including the genetic foundation of the analogy – before forming an opinion.
@DNW:
Both are very approachable. And if you email Woodley with specific queries or arguments, he’ll most likely send you a detailed scholarly response with citational chapter and verse. Dutton is more the showman with very entertaining schtick.
I put a lot of blame on the now trite but once revolutionary teaching that one should find one’s own way. How does that work out in practice when we only have one lifetime and many mistakes are irreversible and compound?
Zaphod:
____________________________________
You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.
–James Joyce, “Ulysses”
____________________________________
Stephen Dedalus was Joyce’s younger self in “Ulysses.”
I might need to start a GoFundMe:
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22460719213&cm_sp=SEARCHREC-_-WIDGET-L-_-BDP-F&searchurl=fe%3Don%26pn%3Dshakespeare%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dulysses%26an%3Djoyce
The binding appears to have faded to a more snotgreen scrotumtightening sea colour than the original fabled Greek Flag Blue, but still a steal at $93K. I’ll take two, please.
God Almighty, Huxley. You mentioned some significant issues, but not all that.
Ok, I’m out of philosophical, logical, and psychological references to try and explain what I am getting at here, by referencing a contributing moral cooperation and complicity; i.e., the choice element that at some psychic level knowingly and cynically decides to jump on the bandwagon to hell.
The only thing left is that old RC catechism material I found, and which will be incomprehensible to people not sharing at least an understanding of the implied A-T anthropology underlying the idea of a human being which actually can undertake a ruthless examination of its own conscience and motives. Obviously, some people don’t belive humans are such creatures, much less being entities morally obligated to perform such actions, whether the encompassing framework be purely secular or a more “metaphysical” [ a euphemism used here] sense.
What I can refer to is a William Golding novel written decades ago and published in 1979. It’s an involved novel containing two stories arcing toward a conclusion. I recall loaning the book to a couple of people who found it so disturbing they could hardly deal with it. But that was years ago before nihilism became a fashion. Which leads me to the twins in the story: Matty and Sophiy. What Golding describes is a process in which the girls, or one at least, quite consciously chooses to take that backward leap into entropy or chaos, you might say.*
I think that the description of that process of choosing to be perverse or to cynically join the forces of chaos as novelist John Gardner put it **, is one of the more impactful things I had ever read to that time.
*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Visible_(novel)
** https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Fiction-Harper-Torchbook-5069/dp/0465052266
Ok. Gotta stop. Can’t even see the text on this tablet clearly. Stomach flu may have something to do with it. Probably should get a pair of reading glasses.
Too damn proud. Ha
@DNW:
I believe in Free Will / Choice. I mean I must believe. And this despite all my interest in Bio Determinism. We *must* believe in Free Will or it’s game over for humanity.
It’s obvious that our ‘elites’ believe in Determinism for us and Free Will for themselves and their children…. or they’d send them to Public Schools.
Presumably you champion Moral Fiction because having free will in a void is not a good place to be. We need signposts.
Has anyone here watched Kurosawa’s Ran? The final scene with the blind boy feeling his way toward the cliff’s edge with the shakuhachi accompaniment is a cinematic masterpiece.
PS: Get well soon! FWIW I was an even grumpier person until I bit the bullet and started wearing spectacles. After the fact, realized that subliminal frustration caused by imperfect vision had been eating at me for some time.
DNW:
I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point of explaining human nature, not even on this blog 🙂 .
However, the differences among people are pretty obviously going to be due to various combinations of nature/nurture, as well as unknowns such as soul. But I will add that (1) I don’t think people who are not sociopaths knowingly go over to the dark side; the people I know who are hateful and nasty for political reasons think of themselves as crusaders fighting evil (2) some of this has to do with how angry a person is in general, and how many other outlets the person has for his/her anger (3) it also has to do with a person’s sources of information (4) plus the desire to belong is a factor, if a person is in a political echo chamber such as, for example, San Francisco (5) the amplification of nastiness due to social media, which is often a competition to see who can be the nastiest.
You might say, how can anyone participate in such behavior? It’s easy for many people if they have the justification that their nastiness is a way to show how much they hate evil and evildoers. It becomes a form of virtue in their eyes.
And of course, not everyone on the Democrat side participates in that sort of thing.
Back to topic… Geez, “National Review” is back on the case:
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Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
For millions of other people, Rush Limbaugh was the largest impediment to embracing conservatism. I count myself in this group. I’m not Rush Limbaugh’s target audience and never was. At 14 years old, I bought and enjoyed Al Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.
–Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Rush’s Place?”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/rushs-place/?
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Can they not stop doing this? Dougherty tries to say some nice things about Rush, while alternately slipping in the blade.
The bright spot was the comments mostly slapped MBD’s wrist and pretensions. NR comments these days tend to NeverTrump, but the day after Limbaugh’s death is too rich even for them.
huxley:
I think the loathing of a lot of Republicans for Rush and Trump is simple snobbery. Rush and Trump (even though the latter was born to wealth) are declasse in their eyes.
I never cared for Rush’s show, but I don’t look down at him nor do I look down at people who do. But I think a lot of NR types do look down at them all.
I think the tell there is when he writes that to a lot of people “Rush Limbaugh was the largest impediment to embracing conservatism.” What? It’s the idea of conservatism (or any other political group) as a social club you might or might not want to join, depending on the classiness of its members (or the intellectualism, or whatever the trait might be).
That’s instead of arriving at political choices through principles and beliefs about good government, liberty, that sort of thing.
Compare Dougherty’s treatment of Limbaugh to his obituary for Joseph Sobran a decade ago.
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=i+will+miss+joe+sobran&d=4918382037046898&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=ozccD4WcoAm8n181j2MSnQ-ctodCfosl
J. E. Dyer has a touching tribute to Rush, along with a personal anecdote well worth reading.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/02/18/rush-limbaugh-happy-warrior/
I noticed that my local newspaper’s obituary article about Rush quoted Joe Biden saying that Rush was a racist. I doubt that Joe ever listened to Rush–why would he? He would just hear exactly what he did not want to hear. But that statement is just a lie. I used to listen to Rush quite often–less so recently due to life circumstances. But I NEVER heard a racist word from Rush. And he was kind and patient with callers, too. He was never really a “shock jock.” Liberals just found it shocking that Rush expressed conservative ideas.
Similarly, the New York Times article suggested that “Bo Snerdley” does not exist, but of course he does. I’m sure you all know that his real name is James Golden. I follow him on Twitter, and his kindness and goodness shine through there–and his deep friendship with Rush.
We have to remember that Joe Biden is an idiot. An intelligent person would never run as a Democrat. We have to also remember that many Democrats regard themselves as intelligent people.